Bill Adcocks ran 10 marathons under 2 hours 20 minutes.   He was second in the 1966 Empire Games in Kingston, Jamaica behind Scotland’s Jim Alder, won the Fukuoka Marathon in 1968 in 2:10:48 and in 1969, he ran in the Athens Classic Marathon, which is run over the same course as the original marathon run by Pheidippides. He set a course record, clocking 2:11:07, which was not broken until 2004.

Bill Adcocks finished a valiant fifth in the altitude-affected gruelling 1968 Olympic Marathon in Mexico City.   The race started at 3:00 pm local time. There were 75 competitors from 41 countries. Eighteen of them did not finish.   ie over 25% of the best marathon runners in the world as represented at the meeting failed to finish.   A look at the names of the non-finishers shows that Jim Alder, Abebe Bikila (Ethiopia), Lajos Mecser (Hungary), Mohammed Gammoudi (Tunisia), Jurgen Haase (GDR), Jerome Drayton (Canada) failed to finish and both of the two French selections had DNF after their names as did two of the three Hungarians and both Kuwaitis.  It was a  remarkable run to finish in 2:25:33 when 43 of the finishers were outside 2 hours 30 minutes.

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